


A Book of Viscera

by ncfan



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Speculation, Gen, Triggers, animal cruelty, unanswered questions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 21:46:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17251952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Mary Keay didn't believe in unsolvable mysteries, and as it happened, she didn't believe in coincidences, either, not where fear was concerned. But whether a mystery could be solved in a human lifetime, that was another matter. And perhaps the book of poetry Doctor Tillerson had had in her safe wasn't worth the effort, after all.





	A Book of Viscera

**Author's Note:**

> [ **CN/TW** : Animal cruelty, non-explicit murder]

There were so many mysteries in the world whose answers were just out of reach, just beyond the grasp of man. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with three of the pieces missing. You were so close to having a full picture of what was going on, but there were gaps, and the gaps would never be filled in. But Mary Keay knew someone who had a very different perspective on what jigsaw puzzles were good for, and she didn’t believe in unsolvable mysteries, anyways. There was nothing beyond her ability to uncover. Whether she could uncover it in her lifetime was another matter.

It would have helped to know whether Doctor Tillerson had found the books separately, or if they had come to her as a set. It seemed to strain credulity that one person could just _find_ two of the books in separate incidents, without it having some immediately visible effect on her person, but then, her Gerard had tracked down three to date, and the first he’d found, the very first…

Coincidence, perhaps. And perhaps it was merely coincidence that book of bones and book of skin (originally) were both written in Sanskrit. The books couldn’t all be written in English, after all. The world was a big place—vaster by far than you could imagine, and tighter than you ever dreamed—and fear gripped the minds of all people. The Flesh was so random that coincidence was certainly a possibility.

Mary didn’t especially believe in coincidences where fear was concerned, though. The connections were there, like glistening strands of silk holding it all together. And coincidence offended her sense of mystery, anyhow.

Mary was still a child when she had first set about learning Sanskrit. At the time, she had thought that learning Sanskrit was necessary to truly put the skin book to its full use—Doctor Tillerson had been such a mutilated, incomplete thing that Mary thought that writing in English just wasn’t the thing (And to be fair, her best results _had_ always come from Sanskrit). Learning to speak and read and write in Sanskrit would make it easier to discern just how the skin book worked, and the bone book bore learning more about, as well.

Her mother had been confused. Her mother was gone often enough, exhausted by her work at the Institute and what the Eye asked of her in return for its patronage, that it had been easy to hide the books from her, even when that entailed regular disposal of bent and twisted animal bones. Mary told her mother that she was just broadening her horizons, and Elsa von Closen, daughter of (an impoverished branch of) a noble house, took to that explanation enthusiastically. Started pushing Mary towards French and German and Latin, but still, it was better than nothing.

Mary didn’t think her mother had ever suspected, which was delicious. Her mother, whom she had watched more than once wrench secrets from the minds of the unwilling, whom she had watched convince their landlord into lowering their rent— _“You will never know how I knew; just know that I could tell everyone else what I know”_ —couldn’t tell that her daughter had two items of power tucked away in her matchbox of a bedroom. It was enough to buoy Mary whenever the process of becoming literate and conversant in Sanskrit hit a snag.

She was nearly a woman by the time she had gained mastery in the language, and her studies of the books of skin and bone could commence in earnest. Always, the skin book took precedent. Mary would admit that readily. It called to her more clearly than did the bone book, and it held such possibilities…

She’d tested animals first—that was easier, that was less dangerous—and had met with disappointment. Whatever power the skin book was granted as a conduit of the End, it did not appear to extend to animals; the skin book was a horror for humanity only. On the rare occasion she managed to skin a pelt fit to write on, once Mary had sewn it into the book, there was no effect. Nothing happened, and more than once she had ripped out the stitches with a snarl, flinging the pelt into the nearest alleyway bin with a short, sharp stroke of her arm.

(This was, as it happened, rather more difficult to hide from her mother than had been the simple storage of the two books in her childhood bedroom. Mary wasn’t quite as good at cleaning specks of blood from her skin and her clothes as she had thought she was, and of course her mother noticed. Elsa always looked at her so strangely when Mary came home after an experiment with one of the local stray cats.

“Mary, darling, have you been in a _fight_?”

Mary found her own place to live not long afterwards.)

Mary’s early alliances had been born primarily to facilitate the business of procuring fresh bodies for her experiments. As was the same in every age of its existence, London had a robust network of connected persons (and otherwise) who didn’t need much of a reason to kill someone, and didn’t ask much in return for an excuse to satisfy their own urges. Just small favors, really, and if it meant that Mary was remembered as someone helpful, someone resourceful, so much the better.

She learned the tricks from them. She took what she needed from them. Not that any of them ever seemed to realize that that was what was happening; no one ever seemed to realize that they were just as much a commodity as the people whose fear they consumed. If Mary had to guess, she’d say that glutting your own base urges too frequently doesn’t do much for your intelligence. Discipline is better for the mind.

Always, the most emphasis had to be on uncovering and mastering the secrets of the skin book. But in between that, there was time for the bone book.

Not that the bone book, as it seemed, had too many secrets to yield up. It was a simple book of poetry about dying animals. And it wasn’t especially _good_ poetry, either. It had neither artistry nor grace; it was just a cacophonous mess of blood and pain and fear.

( _Writhe on the ground with a spear in your belly_  
 _Writhe and the tip drives in deeper_  
 _Like a spoon in a pot the spear tip gathers your innards to itself_  
 _Ready to yank them out and dash them to the ground_  
 _Your dimming eyes will be filled with the red sight of your mutilation_  
 _You will not escape with a scar_ )

Mary sometimes wondered at the age of the books. The skin book was, it was clear, quite old. The earliest pages were in a dialect of Sanskrit that her studies informed her was quite archaic, and though time had neither left the earliest pages rotten nor unreadable, they clearly bore the withered marks of great age. The bone book, on the other hand, was written in a much more modern dialect of Sanskrit; Mary had encountered only a handful of words she couldn’t make sense of.

As best as she could tell, all the bone book did on its own was drop bones. _That_ , it did quite a lot of, constantly dropping bird and rat and snake bones, and other small bones Mary couldn’t identify. Mary did wonder sometimes why the bones all seemed to be bent and twisted into such odd shapes. She perhaps could have come by the answers if she had allowed certain of the people in her little network to examine it, but Mary was not a novice, and she knew how this game was played. You don’t win by showing all your cards, after all.

( _You are trapped fast between two giant pincers_  
 _The prongs are soft and ridged and yet unyielding_  
 _Struggle all you like and you will never escape_  
 _You quiver in this iron embrace for eternities untold_  
 _And then, pressure_  
 _And then, agony as that terrible pressure descends upon your wing_  
 _And then, a tearing that is like the tearing of the world as it is flung into the void_  
 _You will never fly again_ )

On its own, the bone book was rather uninspiring, but Mary was not a child to be fooled by uninspiring appearances. Naturally, it was time for experiments.

She tried reading poems over the corpses for a while. That elicited no results that Mary could discern.

She tried copying some of the shorter poems into the margins of her newly-created pages. _That_ created a mess of sometimes astonishing proportions. The results were so badly garbled that Mary found the pages completely unusable, and had no choice but to rip them out.

She had tried writing the entries in the style (if you could really call it thus) of the poems in the bone book. All that did was produce inferior results, equal to Mary’s first experiments with humans when she was a young woman.

It was just a book of viscera, after all, and when Jurgen Leitner had come sniffing around asking if Mary had anything _strange_ she’d like to sell, she offered it up to him. Showed him the way it dropped bones almost constantly, and struggled not to laugh when he took the thing much more seriously than he ought to have, and paid her a sum that certainly far exceeded the temporal value of the book. It wasn’t like she disabused him of the notions that had clearly popped into his head. She wished him joy of it, and sent him on his way. The money he’d given her could be considered recompense for all the times he’d been in her bookshop and not bought anything.

( _The blood that pounds in your veins rushes to water the earth_  
 _You have been running so long, and all for naught_  
 _The hunters wear your kin’s skins as trophies and soon they will wear yours_  
 _You shall be a trophy for your hunters and a symbol of terror to your kin_  
 _You shall never see your cubs again_ )

The bone book was Leitner’s now, and Mary didn’t expect to see it again. When the library was attacked, she suspected it had either been reclaimed by the Flesh, or simply been destroyed. So long as no agent of the Flesh realized that it was she who had kept it out of circulation for so many decades, Mary didn’t really care what became of it.

And then, first of the three he found, of _all_ the books of power he could have found, her Gerard carried it back to her one night.

Perhaps it was a coincidence, but that offended Mary’s sense of mystery too much for her to ever accept it. The idea that the mystery would outlive her offended her even more, but ah, well, that was what one’s children were _for_. And she had a certain contingency plan in the works, anyways.

But being stamped with Leitner’s seal had not made the bone book any less opaque than it had been when its cover was unmarked. Mary tried a couple more experiments, just to see if things she’d not tried before might yield results, but nothing.

“Huh,” Mary muttered one morning as she leafed through the little book, a slight frown stealing over her mouth.

There was a new page.


End file.
